Facebook trades under $30, down 7%+ - <AUTHOR> http://www.google.com/finance?q=fb&safe=active

<comment><USER2> This is exactly how companies get sucked into the quarterly chase of Wallstreet. Facebook shouldn't be concerned and neither should you.

</comment><comment><USER3> So...when is Zuckerberg scheduled to be interviewed on Squawk Box?

</comment><comment><USER4> I think, the Facebook stocks down is not so tragic. Zuck well know what is real price of Facebook stocks and can take a bull strategy. And if it, this terrible falling is not so terrible for Zuck. It just my point of view, but it have some chance to be a real picture.

I'm agree with many hn's that mobile is a general way for today Facebook. But today main Zuck plan look like a only increasing ads on Facebook - I'm talking about new Promote button - [http://www.socialbakers.com/blog/587-get- ready-4-new-faceboo...](http://www.socialbakers.com/blog/587-get-ready-4-new- facebook-timeline-features/) Let me be honest - I'm not undersand Zuck. He have long war with Google for search traffic but still not released a Facebook Search. He can build a many new sections with new features (with ad) but still not. Well, he can experience with new brand pages (bild a new guidline and start migrate website inside Facebook and host it) or choose a absolutley new way of monetization (they are obvious) but this all still do not. I think, Zuck must hire a new CEO and calm down, then stocks can grow up to $160-$220 and more.

</comment><comment><USER5> Alternate title: FB down 20%+ since IPO

You'd be gambling enough already if you bought FB stock at 20x earnings (the tech norm for well-established companies), let alone at 100x.

At 20x, you'd be speculating on FB's ability to sustain its current earnings power in an increasingly competitive and verticalized space. That's a tough proposition, particularly since social graphs are not as much of a competitive moat as people thought (Orkut for example had at some point virtually the entire online population of Brazil engaged with it, virtually none now), and everybody and their mother is investing in a new social network for a different vertical.

Of course, it is entirely possible that FB will not only maintain its market position, but also increase its earnings power five-fold or whatever. In that scenario, they would have squashed most other vertical social networks and found a sustainable business model (they haven't really yet, see [1]).

Again, not impossible, but bear in mind what assumptions the current valuation implies. It's not surprising to see the market re-adjust its valuation after the IPO craze.

[1] <http://cdixon.org/2012/05/15/facebooks-business-model/>

<comment><USER6> The social graph is not their moat. It's the ubiquity. It's a Microsoft-angle, to dominate "social" and become a de-facto identity provider.

That the social graph feeds ubiquity and vice-versa is what makes the proposition appealing.

Google+ is about the only real competition, and it's really designed for a separate purpose.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> It's around a $23,000 reduction of market cap per second from the IPO 8 days ago (<https://twitter.com/Scirra/status/207481113902465024>)

A pretty spectacular rate of value loss

<comment><USER8> I guess that's it for the "hyperinflation is coming!!!" gold-crazed Ron Paul- supporting crowd.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> No surprise. It was grossly hyped and over valued. It's marketable price is being determined by the markets.

</comment><comment><USER10> Facebook is currently trading at 28.8, Down 9.62% [1].

[1] [http://www.google.com/finance?chdnp=1&chdd=1&chds=1&...](http://www.google.com/finance?chdnp=1&chdd=1&chds=1&chdv=1&chvs=maximized&chdeh=0&chfdeh=0&chdet=1338366029869&chddm=1173&chls=IntervalBasedLine&q=NASDAQ:FB&ntsp=0)

</comment><comment><USER11> Why does Google show a market cap of only $62B? If the $38 IPO was a $104B valuation, $29 should be $79B

<comment><USER12> [http://www.quora.com/What-is-the-difference-between- market-c...](http://www.quora.com/What-is-the-difference-between-market-cap- and-valuation)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> You would have to be nuts now to even think about taking a job at Facebook and if you are there, I'd think about leaving in all seriousness.

I predict that Facebook is going to have a hard time hiring good talent now. This is one of the downsides of filling up your stock with a lot of hot air. It's all short term gain.

</comment><comment><USER14> So should I buy Facebook stock while it's low? Confused.

</comment><comment><USER15> Wanna see something cool? Put FB and ZNGA side by side on the graph:

[http://www.google.com/finance?chdnp=1&chdd=1&chds=1&...](http://www.google.com/finance?chdnp=1&chdd=1&chds=1&chdv=1&chvs=maximized&chdeh=0&chfdeh=0&chdet=1338321600000&chddm=1955&chls=IntervalBasedLine&cmpto=NASDAQ:ZNGA&cmptdms=0&q=NASDAQ:FB&ntsp=0)

<comment><USER16> I always do that when there's a post about facebook stock and it's quite entertaining to seem those two go side by side on the up-down roller coaster.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> under $29 now! How low will it go?

<comment><USER18> is there a point after which a decrease fulls itself ? I know nothing about stock market, first day drop might signals frailty or wrong pricing but won't stable negative continuity trigger a global resell reflex ?

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Morgan Stanley has been putting in floors to keep this stock from totally crashing. They cannot keep it up forever.

<comment><USER20> Do you have proof? I know that on opening Friday we saw it sit at $38.00 and that was obviously MS, but since then I don't see any evidence in the stock price that this has happened since. On the 23rd the stock traded at 31.53 a few times but later in the day traded at 31.52.

I'd love to see MS take a beating for that 100m they got for underwriting this poorly orchestrated IPO, I just haven't been able to see it happening unless there is proof I am unaware of.

<comment><USER21> At least for the first day, this was documented (and expected) from the underwriters. [http://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-banker-morgan- stanle...](http://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-banker-morgan-stanley- bought-a-humongous-amount-of-stock-to-try-support-price-2012-5)

Underwriters start out with a net short position on an IPO so that they can step in to support if necessary.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> An internet legendary destroyed by wallstreet.

<comment><USER23> This view is actually false. I should probably respond to a more visible comment but this will have to suffice.

The winners in the IPO, and this has been said before (not just by me), is facebook and zuckerberg. The losers are the underwriters and their clients who the underwriters placed the stock with (and now, the rest of the retail investment market).

Typically an IPO is priced such that 'insiders' are getting a better deal than the retail investors will have when supply starts to open up. This IPO, that methodology was reversed. It was a huge stock->cash dump, and will benefit $FB near term because they have some 20+bn in cash now, but probably ruin them long term because of the reputation hit they took, and the prevailing view that their stock is worthless.

TL;DR; facebook screwed wallstreet more than it got screwed by wallstreet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I think that the big difference is that Google is a company while Facebook is a product.

<comment><USER24> Down voted? Nice community bro.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Let's look at this in simple terms. Let's look for evidence of a "business model".

Website becomes popular.

Website gets personal details from users: email, maybe photos, address, etc., plus it gets a list of "friends" for each user.

Website shows display ads.

(Website gives birth to games company. Games company goes public then loses half its value in two months.)

Does website have a "business model"?

Wait, we're not done.

Website monitors everything users do on the website as well as, to the extent they can, the other websites users visit, using web beacons scattered across the web (Like buttons, aka "Facebook Connect").

Website shows display ads.

Do we have a business model yet?

But wait, there's more.

Website goes public and raises a heap of easy cash.

Website acquires a web browser, produces a mobile phone and begins monitoring everything users do on the web and every conversation they have with their friends.

Website shows display ads.

Do we have a business model yet?

Or is this just lots and lots of spying, information collection and dreaming that this is somehow useful for business?

Display ads are not a business model that will grow a business, unless the business is itself a display ad company.

(And Google already acquired those guys years ago.)

<comment><USER26> I thought they are already making money.

<comment><USER25> They made money in the past, as more and more users kept signing up and using the site (more new eyeballs on the display ads). We're looking to the future now. What happens when the number of new users starts to slow down? As a public company, there is increased pressure for it to perform and to grow. Increasing the enormous net worth of the CEO and some insiders and then gradually fizzling out is not, one would think, the objective of a corporation that goes public. The usual reason companies raise money through IPO's is to grow the company.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Does anyone have any insider info on when Facebook's employee lockup period ends? The shares won't end up worthless but I can't see them being worth billions.

<comment><USER28> Employees are typically awarded stock options with a non-zero strike price based on the FMV of the company at the time the options grant. Those options very well could end up worthless.

<comment><USER29> I imagine many of them hedged with options on the open market.

[edit] I just learned below that that market just opened, so that strategy must not have been available to them.

<comment><USER30> Employees are not allowed to trade in FB options.

<comment><USER31> Hedging Zynga options should work almost as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I know everyone keeps pointing to the 100:1 P/E but with 900 million active users that is more than 100 bucks per user. Is the average FB user worth 100 dollars to FB?

<comment><USER33> To be fair, FB doesn't need to get $100/user to be worth the $100 billion valuation.

Realistically, they need to be making somewhere on the order of $6.7 billion/year to have a "healthy" P/E of 15.

So, assuming that costs scale linearly with profit(they won't), FB needs to really be making around $25/user for the $100 Billion valuation to have a healthy P/E.

<comment><USER34> Also, you should consider that $25 is way different for users from different countries. Its not the same to get that money from someone in the USA than from someone in Brazil (it's second market), India (3rd), Indonesia(4th), Mexico(5th), Turkey(7th), etc... [1]

Business in those countries will not pay the same to publish their ads in FB, simply because the expected return will be lower.

[1] [http://www.socialbakers.com/facebook- statistics/?interval=la...](http://www.socialbakers.com/facebook- statistics/?interval=last-week)

<comment><USER33> But the end result is that they need to get, in pure revenue, $25/user across the entire world. It's an average across the entire user space.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Can anyone explain why they are down 7%?

<comment><USER7> Supply and demand is the answer, although probably not the one you are looking for!

The WSJ reported the options market has just opened for FB stocks. A lot of people seem to be very bearish about FB so a lot of short action could significantly impact the demand of FB stock.

I'm an amateur at this though, and would love someone to correct me if I'm completely off here :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> In 1 month the price will be back to, or above, the original IPO.

<comment><USER37> And how much of your own money are you putting where your mouth is on that one? If you're right, you could make a _lot_ of money with that bet.

<comment><USER38> How much money did these people that "knew it would fail, of course!" put on shorting it when it was $35? If any of the people that "knew $38 was way too high" had done that, they'd be out counting their money on a beach, not sitting at their desk.

It's all just hindsight garbage.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> The employees, they dumped a lot of their shares probably. They are allowed since Monday to sell them.

<comment><USER7> How many shares did the employees own?

Even if they all sold all of them, is it really enough to have a meaningful impact on the price of the stock with that much trading volume and that large of a market cap? Probably not!

<comment><USER37> If you count Zuckerberg as an employee, then I'm pretty sure he owns _more shares than were issued in the IPO_.

Even if you don't, a huge slab of the company is owned by current and former employees.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> FB IPO is bad for the startup world

<comment><AUTHOR> Agreed.

I wonder how much of the current froth is based on people trying to be the next Facebook or Instagram?

If Facebook takes off and justifies their early valuation, the startup/angel/incubator/VC world would go into the stratopshere.

If it continues to languish, people are going to be much more skeptical in making investments and even starting web based businesses.

A lot hinges on this stock price for the rest of us....

<comment><USER41> I don't think the possibility of a $50B exit vs a $100B exit will make any difference for most angel investors.

<comment><USER42> What will make a difference is that neither Instagram or Pinterest would get anywhere near as much of a valuation today as they did a month ago.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> While the IPO was bad for investors, it was certainly good (financially) for Facebook. They definitely maximized their earnings from the IPO and Zuckerberg really made out well getting just under $38/share for his $1.1bn in shares.

In contrast to the Google IPO in which the stock skyrocketed on the first day and really took off after that. Google may have been able to extract quite a bit from their IPO than they did.

<comment><USER44> The early investors made out like kings, but I doubt Facebook's employees are in a cheery mood as they watch their options sink underwater and their vested paper wealth dissipate while waiting for the lockup period to end.

<comment><USER45> I'd like for someone to explain precisely what Facebook should have done to ensure a big pop. Value the shares at $5? What if their internal projections indicated the company was worth more than that? Picking an artificially low strike price for the options probably would have resulted in people going to jail, not to mention all the employees owing taxes on the difference.

<comment><USER46> From what I've seen, it was hugely overvalued. Maybe $25-$50 billion, with a share price of $28-$32.

Last minute change to $38+ was suicide.

<comment><USER47> If you wanted to value it at $25-$50B, the share price would accordingly be $12-$24.

Remember market cap = total shares * price. :)

<comment><USER46> You assume that the number of shares being offered was static, hence the price drop by half.

More realistically, Facebook should have sold less shares, which would have kept the price at that target. But I guess it couldn't sell less: they had a bucketload of people who wanted to sell, and all the biggest potential buyers had already bought... Lesson learned: don't get talked into secondary market abuse...

<comment><USER47> Maybe I've had too much coffee so I'm not understanding your comment, but market cap is based on total outstanding shares, whether they were being sold on the market or not. 10 stocks issued total, company's value doesn't inherently change based on whether 5 stocks are sold in public vs 10 vs 1.

Sure I get the supply and demand thing you're trying to articulate, but the reality is that I as an investor am concerned that FB is overvalued at 100B marketcap, whether the shares are sold at $1 or $10000.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> There are only two parties hurt by this:

1\. The premiere clients of Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley who bought into the lie that FB should trade at >100:1 P/E; and

2\. Facebook.

(1) I don't care about. (2) is the interesting one. You'll note that I don't include the employees in the list of injured parties. They're largely in a lockout anyway (I assume?). Whether it opens at $38 and drops to $30 or starts at $20 and climbs to $30 is of little consequence.

Facebook strategically seems concerned with only two companies: Google (disclaimer: I work for Google) and Apple, both of which have established, proven businesses and strategic assets in Internet and mobile going forward.

Facebook is a platform company without a mobile platform in a world becoming increasingly mobile.

Facebook has a lot of cheerleaders, optimists and pundits all backing this idea that the potential of all this data is huge, so much so that I believe they started to believe their own positive press. It's an easy trap to fall into.

But make no mistake: this is bad for Facebook. Sure some investors, Zuck and (maybe?) some employees made a few more dollars but Facebook doesn't need the money and neither do most of the investors. But that's incredibly shortsighted.

Facebook's ability to retain and attract talent and make stock-based acquisitions is in large part determined by the health and outlook of their stock. If they'd IPOed for $20-25 and jumped to $30 then they would have a lot of momentum behind them.

Instead the press is "how low will it go?" What kind of position is that to be in if, say, you're trying to negotiate a $1B+ stock-based acquisition?

Anyway, I'm glad about this drop. Not out of any kind of schadenfreude but because the market is acting... rationally. These P/Es were never justified and instead of not mattering and the stock skyrocketing anyway (which would happen were we in a bubble, which we are not), the stock is seeking a more appropriate level.

This is good for us, the tech industry and the market and the fact that some choice clients of Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley got bilked along the way is just gravy as far as I'm concerned.

EDIT: to clarify, I don't really have a position on what the appropriate level is other than $38 is and was too high. It could still well go lower than $30.

<comment><USER49> How can you say the P/E isn't justified when Facebook isn't monetizing +60% of their impressions (mobile)?

<comment><USER50> Because the app has been out since 2008, gone through multiple iterations, currently holds a 2-star rating on the App Store, and still hasn't managed to monetize 60% of their impressions.

<comment><USER49> It's not that is hasn't "managed to monetize," they haven't even TRIED. Very big difference.

<comment><USER51> But who is monetizing mobile banner ads?

<comment><USER49> Google, InMobi, iAds? It's a $2.6B dollar market that is growing 2x yoy. Don't overlook this market.

<comment><USER51> It's a 2.6B market for ALL MOBILE ads (of which banner ads are only .86 - <http://www.emarketer.com/PressRelease.aspx?R=1008798>)

So in 2014 it will be a 2B market - across ALL mobile. How big of a share can FB have - 20-30%? Still looks like a very small number.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Does masters degree makes sense? - <AUTHOR> Boring lectures, assignments, waiting for the degree to complete. Is masters degree really worth it?<p>I want to quit but I feel guilty of not completing it. I might miss out on opportunities in future. I might have a feeling in future "Only if I had tried a little harder..."
But at the moment it's making me depressed. I procrastinate and finish assignments at the last moment. <comment><USER2> Well, I left in the middle of mine and lately have been thinking to go back before the ~6 years of concurrency your coursework has dries up.

However, I studied Japanese and was able to leverage that to get a job that enabled me to travel.

It is probably good to have something lined up, but you should really use your life for: things you are enthusiastic about, things that help people, and that give you love and happiness. Only you can decide for yourself the best route, but I do have an idea for you; you can always ask for loans and use the money as you see fit... perhaps your next loan you can use to buy some real-estate to fix up and rent, or start a small business if you have a solid idea. The ability to get some seed money before you gracefully walk out the door might be just what you need to get you over the edge and into the life of your dreams. Something to consider.</comment>


Dropbox shows what hacking is all about - <AUTHOR> http://theindustry.cc/2012/03/26/dropbox-shows-what-hacking-is-all-about/ <comment><AUTHOR> When was the last time you saw a "within-the-company" hackathon like this?

<comment><USER2> My company (www.within3.com) does it all the time :) It's actually fairly common for companies to do this :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Cool! Yea, I'm sure many companies do this, but like this? I don't what it is about the video, but it makes the whole thing seem real and original.

Idk, maybe it's just the background music, lol.</comment></comment></comment>


An entire video of anime that is contained in the subtitle file inside - <AUTHOR> https://nyaa.si/view/1096843 <comment><AUTHOR> Here's the tl;dr from the makers themselves:

They contains 16894 line entries, which correspond to every frame from the original file. Every line is composed of several colored vector drawings in the form of cubes. Each one has the size of 1x1 pixels. These lines are aligned with the top left corner, and contain internal newlines to create rows and columns. Every single of these pixels is colored. It is a lossless transformation from the pngs produced to embedding them, so you could recover the original easily. TL;DR: every line contains one frame of video. In the subtitles.</comment>


MegaBots says it will shut down if it can't reach its next crowdfunding goal - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2017/11/16/megabots-says-it-will-shut-down-if-it-cant-reach-its-next-crowdfunding-goal/ <comment><USER2> > The company's asking for a massive $950 million

The kickstarter page says it's $950,000

<comment><USER2> Techcrunch corrected the article now.</comment></comment>


What the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women Day of Awareness Meant to Natives - <AUTHOR> https://www.heitkamp.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/2018/5/teen-vogue-what-the-missing-and-murdered-indigenous-women-day-of-awareness-meant-to-native-women <comment><USER2> > Among Native women victims of rape or sexual assault, an average of 67 > percent describe the offender as non-Native.

This really changes the tone of the outcry, I had no idea. (the link misquotes the source, but this is irrelevant)

<comment><USER3> In my opinion, and I believe my opinion has largely been informed by relevant experiences (I grew up in a very racist, anti-indigenous community so I feel as though I had to overcome that before I could see this more clearly), the first nations of Canada and native indians of the United States (like other minorities in the same places) have historically been victims of others rather than of themselves.

I watched awful things growing up. The extent of bullying, the disillusion of first nations kids from _very_ young ages, the poverty - very little of it was perpetrated by first nations. If it was, I strongly believe you can trace things back to deep wounds put in their culture by non-indigenous folks.

As a child I didn't understand much of this, but as I get older it brings me an incredible amount of sadness and disappointment in how insensitive my family and even my peers and colleagues have been towards this situation.

A few years ago I learned from a friend surveying in northern Alberta that several bands up there were living without clean water, with overtly depressed children, terrifyingly high suicide rates, traditional territories ruined by development... And that this isn't uncommon across Canada. This is heart breaking.

All of this is to say, I think it's important to recognize that many of these people are suffering not because of the internals of their culture and communities, but because of the negative and destructive external inputs from those around them. It is crucial to understand the extent of this in order to move towards eradicating the racism which feeds our countries' complacency with this situation.

I hate being political or pushing my opinions on the internet, but this one is too important to me. It really deserves a thoughtful, constructive conversation, at the very least to open others' minds to the realities of what's going on.</comment></comment>


IDEs Are Dangerous - <AUTHOR> http://sokolmichael.com/blog/2012/02/21/ides-are-dangerous/

<comment><USER2> I think I disagreed with just about every point on that post. Most of the issues the author describes can be fixed by using your brain and the tools at your disposal.

Your IDE adds metadata to your directory? SVN and git allow you to ignore files and directories.

It's not in the GUI menu so I can't do it! You're doing it wrong.

I can't pipe from my IDE to another program! What? My IDEs create files and these files and their output can be piped wherever. Maybe I'm in the minority but I've never felt the need to pipe directly from vi to anything else. I don't even know how or if that would work. I've piped the file I edited to something else before...which I can still do whether I use an IDE or not.

The whole blog post was just silly.

<comment><USER3> in Vim:

{range}!command will pipe content from vim to another command and back. Examples:

Sort contents of lines in place

:'<,'>!sort

Replace lines with calculated results (ie, line contains "2+3*5" and gets replaced with "17")

:'<,'>!bc

<comment><USER2> I see. Thank you for clarifying, I wasn't aware that was possible. I won't say that's unnecessary but I have yet to need such functionality.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I've never understood peoples dislike for IDE's When I started programming my IDE was a "C:\>", thats it, just 4 letters and a crap load of .BAT files that was different on every developers machine.

Today I use VS2010 and can honestly say I am hundreds times more productive.

"This in turns clutters the interface and goes against the simplicity they advertise."

Sure it's a big IDE with lots of options but when you finaly tune it to your tastes, it fits like a glove and stays out of the way.

Every toolbar and menu can be configured with what you want and made to hide and fly out when commanded.

<comment><USER5> Interesting data point:

I know a good guy who's a lead developer on one of MSFT's very large and visible projects.

I was stunned to learn that he uses vim - in his words, "the best development environment on earth." Very recently, he gave it up and succumbed to VS, because he found that for programming on Azure, he couldn't get by without it any more.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I generally disagree with the author: good IDEs (and, by good, I mean IntelliJ) are a huge productivity win, and are the principle justification for static typing in a language.

 _However_ I think that the author is absolutely right about two points:

* IDEs should integrated more tightly with the environment they are in, like VIM. The One-Tool-To-Rule-Them-All thinking ends up handicapping IDEs: something that would be simple to do via some other tool becomes a copy-paste-exec-copy-paste exercise in frustration.

* IDEs are generally too heavyweight. IntelliJ, the best IDE in the history of all possible universes, grinds like hell opening up a significant project the first time, building up the caches that allow its refactoring and lightening fast find-usages to work. And it demands a project file/project dir. It's bad enough that I end up using TextMate (which I hate) simply because it gives me a browsable tree on the side and decent syntax highlighting whenever I just want to look around in a project.

I think there is a middle ground here: an IDE that is designed with an 80/20 mindset: no caches, no project files, no state, instant open. Offer code completion (which shouldn't require a disk cache, just a parse), jump to definition (same) and then offer a find-usages that is really a grep-then- parse. Not as fast as IntelliJ, but still better than just a grep. And, addressing the first point above, very tight integration with the command line.

I think that's going to be my 40's project.

</comment><comment><USER7> There is a segment of developers that came from the UNIX editors to IDE and we like and prefer the IDE. while I will agree that the editors are fast and configurable they don't totally outweigh the IDE. There is a lot of value in a good IDE and that is why they exist. The article talks about plugins and I would argue that that is a strong point of the IDE, I know some of the UNIX editors have pluggable architectures but a whole lot more effort is going into IDE plugins. For someone in a commercial software shop this can be a good thing, because workflow can be optimized without having to tinker with ones environment there are a lot of people working on workflow type issues in the IDE's and this efficiency is being passed on to others. The trick is finding a good IDE and everyone has their opinions, I personally like Netbeans as it has the workflow that I like and it supports all of the languages that I use. I really think there is some dogma in the anti-IDE arguments and I think it tries to unfairly biases people against good solutions. For some people the UNIX editors are right, for others IDE's are right, to call them dangerous is a little dubious in my opinion as it is rhetorical, the article makes some good arguments for using an editor, and I think it's defense should stand on those merits and not on building the perception that IDE's are a bad choice.

</comment><comment><USER8> One of the biggest pluses of an IDE is the contextual access to the API. This helps a lot when learning a new language/framework.

I haven't used many IDEs lately by when I was learning Java, netbeans was my best friend.

Aside from that, maybe the easy access to debugging. Although tests have made debugging less necessary for me.

</comment><comment><USER9> Charles Petzold has elucidated a lot of the same ideas in: [http://charlespetzold.com/etc/DoesVisualStudioRotTheMind.htm...](http://charlespetzold.com/etc/DoesVisualStudioRotTheMind.html)

Since that's got a 2005 date, can we agree that there's a trend here?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for pointing out the article

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> My biggest problem with IDEs is that they make bad languages and practices (that would otherwise be untenable due to the weight of accidental complexity) just barely work, well enough that they aren't replaced. Most of the Java IDE ecosystem exists to make up for deep deficiencies of the Java language.

Also, Java "best practices" involve shitting all over your directory structure with singleton directories like "com"-- because "no one actually uses the Unix command line anymore"-- and putting tests in a separate directory tree ("src" vs "test").

If you have a Repl, you usually don't need an IDE. If you have no Repl, you're working with stone knives anyway and should just give up. <http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2012/02/07/repl-or-fail/>

What I do like is the idea of a read-only IDE available through the web. Google has something like this (Codesearch) and it's great for large codebases.</comment>


Maternal cannabis use in pregnancy and child neurodevelopmental outcomes - <AUTHOR> https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-1002-5 <comment><AUTHOR> Media reports:

[https://www.insider.com/marijuana-use-in-pregnancy-linked- to...](https://www.insider.com/marijuana-use-in-pregnancy-linked-to-greater- risk-of-autism-2020-8)

[https://medicalxpress.com/news/2020-08-cannabis-pregnancy- li...](https://medicalxpress.com/news/2020-08-cannabis-pregnancy-linked- greater-autism.html)

[https://www.nbcnews.com/health/kids-health/using- marijuana-p...](https://www.nbcnews.com/health/kids-health/using-marijuana- pregnancy-may-heighten-baby-s-risk-autism-n1236306)

[https://www.cnn.com/2020/08/10/health/weed-marijuana- pregnan...](https://www.cnn.com/2020/08/10/health/weed-marijuana-pregnancy- autism-link-wellness/index.html)

</comment><comment><USER2> "We find an association between maternal cannabis use in pregnancy and the incidence of autism spectrum disorder in the offspring. The incidence of autism spectrum disorder diagnosis was 4.00 per 1,000 person-years among children with exposure compared to 2.42 among unexposed children, and the fully adjusted hazard ratio was 1.51 (95% confidence interval: 1.17–1.96) in the matched cohort.

The incidence of intellectual disability and learning disorders was higher among offspring of mothers who use cannabis in pregnancy, although less statistically robust.

We emphasize a cautious interpretation of these findings given the likelihood of residual confounding."</comment>


Why I'm usually unnerved when modern SSDs die on us - <AUTHOR> https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/tech/SSDDeathDisturbing <comment><USER2> I worked on SSD firmware for quite a long time and here is my perspective.

Early flash used to fairly reliable with almost minimal error correction. However with increasing density, smaller processes and multi level cells, it has gone progressively less reliable and slower. Here are some of the things that we need to worry about: [https://www.flashmemorysummit.com/English/Collaterals/Procee...](https://www.flashmemorysummit.com/English/Collaterals/Proceedings/2016/20160808_PreConfH_Parnell.pdf)

To compensate for all these deficiencies, the SSD architecture and hence the entire FTL becomes very complicated because any part of it can become damaged at any time. We always have to have backup algorithms to recovery from any scenario. Its difficult to build algorithms that can recovery from arbitrary failures in a reasonable time. I cannot have a drive sitting around for 20 minutes trying to fsck itself.

Another problem is that the job while rewarding is not very lucrative. The chance of a multi million dollar payoff for an employee is low. I have a higher chance working on a web connected gadget to become a millionaire. So that means it is really hard to recruit those who are top notch programmers who known how to figure out the algorithms, write the code, debug the hardware. Most new grads these days are interested in python, javascript and machine learning.

<comment><USER3> Users and administrators almost certainly prefer a 20 minute IO latency over data corruption. Host operating systems should probably flag an IO as failed long before 20 minutes and then you _know_ 1) nothing made it to disk and 2) have some chance to avoid introducing additional corruption, if e.g., the OS is smart enough to kick out the drive when this happens.

> Another problem is that the job while rewarding is not very lucrative.

Do you mean it's lower paying than typical bigcorp software jobs outside of FAANG, or just that there aren't a lot of startups with astronomical valuations in the media FTL space?

<comment><USER4> Both, and usually significantly.

Last I checked it was nearly twice as lucrative to be a Ruby-on-rails developer than an embedded engineer.

Embedded also attracts a certain type of engineer, usually very smart and able to manage extreme complexity with attention to detail but at the cost of anything resembling readable, let alone maintainable, software. The fact that anything at all works in the modern world is amazing.

I left the embedded space and have never looked back.

<comment><USER5> So $SALT_MINE, a highly profitable privately held Fortune 500 just decided to revamp their pay scales. They've now decided that they want to be at the 50 percentile remuneration-wise in the durable goods sector. That is the white goods sector, washing machines and such.

I predict we will lose all of our engineers - embedded dudes included.

<comment><USER6> Yeah, but their numbers will look good for a year or two and by then they (CEO, etc) will have moved on to another company before things crash.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Not that spinning HDDs are really any different, but SSDs are a perfect example of an entire computer that you attach to yours, and speak with through one of the (many) storage-oriented protocols. The device itself is a black box, and complex transformations take place between the physical persistence of the data and the logical structures that are exchanged on the wire. There are many layers of indirection, and many things that can go wrong, from fault with the underlying physical storage, a physical fault in the controller, or a logical (software) condition in the controller that puts it in an unrecoverable state.

Spinning platter drives have parts that form a more relatable metaphor to humans' notions of wear and tear: skates of magnetic readers flying on a cushion of air above a rapidly rotating disc, with the gap separating a few dozen nanometers, often smaller than the process size in the controller's silicon. They have arms that can move the head over a particular disc radius, and a motor that spins the entire stack of platters. These mechanical components exhibit wear proportional to their use -- this makes intuitive sense, and is also recorded in the SMART attributes, so drives in old age and of many park cycles can be replaced preemptively before they catastrophically fail.

SSDs are missing many of the usual mechanisms that would contribute to physical wear leading to sudden catastrophic failure in advanced age. This means that irrespective of their failure rate vs. HDDs, a higher proportion of their catastrophic failures are the fault of the controller. This is discouraging: essentially, the "storage layer" is now quite reliable, so the fallibility of the human-programmed controller is brought into light.

<comment><USER8> > skates of magnetic readers flying on a cushion of air above a rapidly > rotating disc, with the gap separating a few dozen nanometers, often smaller > than the process size in the controller's silicon.

Complete aside, the fly-height of a magnetic head is actually fractions of a nanometer (i.e. hundreds of picometers).

EDIT: I got this from a talk by Bryan Cantrill[1]. The fly-height is allegedly 0.8 nanometers (800 picometers).

[1]: [https://youtu.be/fE2KDzZaxvE?t=1551](https://youtu.be/fE2KDzZaxvE?t=1551)

<comment><USER9> I do not believe that.

1\. I can't find a source that says less than a few nanometers.

2\. 300 picometers is roughly the diameter of a helium diatom. The head cannot possibly float through hydrodynamic means if an air molecule can barely even fit under it.

<comment><USER10> > The head cannot possibly float through hydrodynamic means if an air molecule > can barely even fit under it.

It can. Since siblings liked airplane analogies, here is another one: Consider the head to be an airplane. It has somewhat wing-similar features which provide a lifting force, but the actual read/write head sits below those features (like, say, a landing gear is below wings).

<comment><USER11> This is correct :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> "When a HD died early, you could also imagine undetected manufacturing flaws that finally gave way. With SSDs, at least in theory that shouldn't happen"

Why shouldn't it? Isn't it just hardware too?

"With spinning HDs, drives might die abruptly but you could at least construct narratives about what could have happened to do that"

Why can't you do the same with SSDs?

It feels like the author's main complaint is the frustration of not understanding SSD hardware as well.

Is this a valid complaint? Are SSDs magical in some way? I'm not an expert but... It's just hardware with pieces that do stuff. Why can't we come up with an understanding of why it fails?

<comment><USER13> "It feels like the author's main complaint is the frustration of not understanding SSD hardware as well."

What is so frustrating about SSDs is how very poorly they compare to previous incarnations of solid state storage.

Using Disk-On-Chip and/or IDE-pin-compatible CF cards, I had many, many devices in the field that lasted, mounted read-only, for _decades_ An entire sect of the computing industry came to rely on these parts as alternatives to spinning media that could not mechanically fail.

This is not the case with SSDs at all. They fail left and right, even mounted read-only, for all manner of complicated and _interesting_ reasons. It's very frustrating that SSDs are not a step forward in reliability from spinning media and are _a step downward_ compared to (for instance) a 16MB consumer CF card from Sandisk, circa 2000.

rsync.net filers, which need a boot mirror, are always constructed with two _unrelated_ SSDs - usually one Intel part and one Samsung part - so that when the inevitable usage-related failure occurs, _it does not occur simultaneously to both members of the mirror_ which have, being a mirror, been subjected to identical usage-lives.[1]

We shouldn't have to do that.

[1] I can't overstate this - if you need a RAID _mirror_ , do not use identical SSDs for the two members of the mirror. There are many, many cases of SSDs failing not due to "wear" or end-of-life, but due to weird usage edge cases that cause them to puke ... and in a mirror, you give the two parts identical usage ... we either get two different generations of Intel part (current gen and just-previous gen) or we get current Intel and current Samsung ...

<comment><USER14> I've heard very similar advice for non-SSD mirrors too. Use different manufacturers or, at the very least, use different batches of disks from the same manufacturer.

<comment><USER10> Most importantly, never assemble an array from drives that took the same shipping path i.e. came out of the same parcel.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> A major problem with SSDs seems to be "firmware death" - where the flash chips are physically fine (or mostly fine), but the firmware (or firmware memory) has gotten corrupted due to some programming error, electrical glitch, or cosmic ray. I've had scores of older SSDs die after things like power outages and sudden shutdown events. This is super frustrating because the data is physically OK but the controller just isn't responding to any requests anymore.

I wonder if there's an easy way to distinguish a controller failure from a flash failure from the behavior of the device over the last few seconds/minutes of operation. In theory a controller failure should cause a fairly abrupt loss of service, but I'm sure there are soft lockup failure modes too.

<comment><USER16> I have seen some weird issues with SSDs. I had an OCZ Vertex 2 die on me multiple times, but one thing that stood out most is that after a power cycle or complete system shutdown (note: reboots were just fine) everything I had done last time - install software, update Windows, create files - was gone. The state was reverted to before the time it booted. It was like my computer contained some kind of Reborn chip, except it was the Sandforce controller malfunctioning.

<comment><USER17> Modern SSDs can have very large DRAM write buffers (8-256MB), this is pretty plausible if it was failing to flush it.

<comment><USER18> It was probably some kind of wear leveling metadata that didnt get flushed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> This is not a technological problem, it's a cultural one. These problems are easily fixed ("easily" by the standards of technical problems that regularly get fixed in other regimes). The reason they don't get fixed is that the customer reaction to failures like this is to rant at the mysterious storage gods that are making their lives miserable.

Needless to say, there are no mysterious storage gods. These are artifacts made by humans, and somewhere out there, there is an engineer who either understands why these failures are happening, or knows how to engineer these devices in such a way that when these failures happen, the cause can be determined, and then a design iteration can be done to reduce the failure rate and make the failure modes more robust. The reason this doesn't happen is that customers aren't demanding it. If major purchasers started demanding, essentially, an SLA from their SSD manufacturers, with actual financial consequences for violating it, you would be amazed how fast all of these problems would get fixed. But instead we vent our frustrations in blog posts and HN comments :-(

<comment><USER20> > Needless to say, there are no mysterious storage gods

What about Consus, the god who protected grain storage in the ancient Roman religion? [1]. Or Eopsin, the Korean goddess of storage? [2]

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consus](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consus)

[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eopsin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eopsin)

<comment><USER21> Those gods are not so mysterious, are they.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I've experienced a few seriously strange issues with modern SSDs, even some of the better ones.

I had a 512GB Samsung drive that became very slow randomly at doing IO operations, the whole machine would die for 10-30 seconds at a time once or twice a day while any process that tried to use the disk became blocked on IO. Then it'd come right back like everything was perfectly fine.

Issues like this definitely worry me, we're basically completely blind as to what those controllers and flash chips are actually doing. Not that it wasn't a similar situation with HDD controllers before, but at least it didn't seem as unpredictable.

<comment><USER23> If on Linux, try running fstrim from time to time. More free space makes life of SSD's garbage collector / defragmenter much easier. I've anecdotally noticed that running fstrim reduces freezeups under heavy load from 1-2s to almost nothing on my Toshiba drive.

<comment><USER22> On Windows 10, I believe it's supposed to automatically TRIM free space on NTFS.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I worked at a storage company, and they reinforced to us how not only does the OS lie to us, but the hard drives also lie to the OS. So you can't take anything you get from a hard drive as reliable, you have to test the data once you get it, ex through CRC, etc. Data can get corrupt at any time.

As densities of data get higher and higher, it doesn't take much to have a catastrophic data failure. The only way to protect against this is having multiple replicas of your data.

<comment><USER10> Application to OS: Did you write that data out to disk?

OS: Yes, I did.

OS' inner voice: Nah, I didn't, but I'll do it soon, I think.

OS to drive: Those write commands, they're durable yet?

Drive: Sure!

Drive's inner voice: Nah, they're still in my RAM, but I'll probably write them out any time now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> In a way we need someone/something like Backblaze doing a SMART report about SSDs to let us know which SMART metrics we should be monitoring...

Because they've shown most metrics are kinda useless or mean different things from one manufacturer to the other.

[https://www.backblaze.com/blog/what-smart-stats-indicate- har...](https://www.backblaze.com/blog/what-smart-stats-indicate-hard-drive- failures/) [https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-smart- stats/](https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-smart-stats/)

</comment><comment><USER26> "We had one SSD fail in this way and then come back when it was pulled out and reinserted, apparently perfectly healthy, which doesn't inspire confidence."

We've experienced exactly the same thing. Our general course of action is to perform a hard power cycle of the server through IPMI - a warm cycle doesn't seem to work. I've always presumed it was down to dodgy SSD controller firmware given the way it suddenly stops appearing in the output of fdisk -l.

<comment><USER27> I have three SSDs in three different laptops/desktops. In their current host machines they've been working flawlessly for a couple of years. Prior to my figuring out which SSD paired best with which host machine, I experienced intermittent strange and catastrophic problems (unreadable sectors to complete data loss) with each one. These were different brands, different capacities, bought in different years.

It's sort of a devil's bargain - the performance of SSDs is so much better that I can't pass up using it over a spinning disk even if they occasionally lose everything. There was a great game for the original Nintendo called "Pinball Quest". As you advanced through the game you could get upgrades such as side stoppers, stronger flippers, etc. You bought these items from a demon in between levels. After the red "Strong Flippers", the next upgrade was the purple "Devil's Flippers". The trick was that occasionally they'd turn to stone when you needed them and possibly cause you to lose the pinball. But they were such an upgrade over the Strong Flippers (when they weren't turned to stone) that you bought them anyway.

SSDs are kind of like that.

<comment><USER28> It also doesn't help that at least Windows 10 is seemingly now "Optimized for SSD" in the sense that performance is quite terrible on a traditional HDD. I imagine this will become more and more common as seek times and hard drive thrashing becomes practically invisible to users as well as developers. It will just get harder to go back as time goes on.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I've had a few SSD's give me random issues, and they are so hard to pin down, sometimes they just work, other times they abruptly stop, or just aren't detected until like 3 reboots later and they work fine. After you've had troubles they make you feel like you are hanging on a hope that the ground won't fall out from under you.

You also CAN'T HEAR if there is an issue, which acts as another warning sign that something might be going wrong or will go wrong soon. Loud tickings or clickings or overwork is a sure sign to start backing up and get ready to buy a new drive!

</comment><comment><USER30> Call me crazy, but I don't think that a Crucial MX300 is the best choice for an enterprise worthy ZFS drive. I get what the author is concerned about, but I wouldn't be that surprised that a consumer level SSD failed in what sounds like a heavily used fileserver.

<comment><USER31> Crucial? I can tell you most of them got spectek's chips inside, no wonder why they fail.

<comment><USER32> what's wrong with spectek chips?

<comment><USER33> They're Micron's B-stock that didn't pass quality tests. i.e. they'll probably die sooner.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> I don't know why my hard drives died either. And while a physical motor breaking is more tangible, a contact wearing out is also imagineable. I don't really care why ssds or hdds die, I care that they do and therefore I have backups (well, ideally I would). I've had spinning rust fail on me while I was sitting at it and it didn't help me save it, it might as well have been dead in zero seconds.

<comment><USER35> I don't really care why hard drives die either, but I like that, more often than not, I get some warning. SMART logs, or weird kernel complaints, in my experience, are frequent precursors.

I'm a little scared about my new SSDs that have replaced a few rust-spinners in our data center.

<comment><USER36> That's the big difference for me. Drive's making tictictick sounds? Kernel log full of bigScaryErrorsLikeThis? It's time to ditch that disk before the disk ditches you. Make it happen. Panic-Backup if you need to. etc.

Every SSD failure I've had, the failure mode was "what SSD?"

Now, I realise most people should ponder their backup regime before the tictictick, not after. But as the phrase goes "The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second-best is now." The SSD equivalent is "The be- nope, too late."

They're just terribly unforgiving, which doesn't fit with a culture that values cure over prevention.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> It may be irrational, but I remain very distrustful of SSDs, in part for reasons like this. I use them occasionally as temporary storage, but I don't use them for anything that would cause me a headache if the drive died without warning. So far, my observation is that their lifespan is considerably shorter than spinning platter drives, and spinning platter drives typically give plenty of warning before actually dying.

Perhaps I'll grow more comfortable after another decade or so, when there is enough real world experience to go by.

<comment><USER36> I'm just distrustful of drives. All storage is essentially cache, and should be treated like it.

I'm of the opinion that harddrives don't actually function, they just maintain the illusion while they wait for a more interesting moment to die.

<comment><USER38> Why do their motors move, then? For making noise?

<comment><USER39> For scratching the platter, obviously.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Maybe I am being overly simplistic, but shouldn't it not matter?

Who in the modern age doesn't back up everything all the time? Don't we all operate with the assumption these things are going to blow at any time? 90%+ of my data is on cloud storage now anyway. When a SSD goes out don't you just chunk it in the drawer of old drives that you promise to take to the disposal center this weekend (and never do) and then take a quick trip to your local computer store for a new one?

This reminds me of something an IT support staffer told me a long time ago... "The difference between a IT pro and a user is that to an IT pro hard drives are a consumable resources".

<comment><USER41> Replacing an SSD is not free, and in most cases it's not easy. Maybe an IT pro can just roll down to the computer store for a new one, put it in their laptop (for free!), and throw a $100+ drive in a drawer without even thinking about warranty, but most people can't. A backup doesn't excuse excessive rates of failure and weird glitches.

<comment><USER42> Replacing an SSD in a modern Apple laptop is literally impossible. You need to replace the whole dang laptop (or motherboard, whatever they call it these days), which is not something a user can do.

Thank goodness for Backblaze, Time Machine, Carbon Copy Cloner, Drobo and Synology. Maybe I have gone overboard, but I have not lost any data in 12+ years.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> I've done a bit of ad-hoc reliability testing with SSD's.

Some years ago I got a great deal on several Pacer disks and wrote a program to write a pseudo-random sequence of data (using a known initial seed) across the entire disk and read it back and compare. Part way through, the data didn't match. No ECC errors, nothing raised by the filesystem, just mismatched bits which came back in a manner which tried to "trick" me into thinking they were good data. This happened on like 5 of the 8 disks. Needless to say I sent those crappy SSD's back to the manufacturer (unfortunately only got a 2/3 refund) along with some harsh words for their engineers.

I've had more name-brand SSD's fail, in various manners (even on well-reviewed Kingston drives). Sometimes in ways that can't be accessed at all, other times (at best of times) in a manner which doesn't allow writes but still allows reads (albeit at a trickle of a datarate).

These days I use solely Intel-based, top-line SSD's, and some (very limited) Samsungs. The choice isn't based on empirical data, but rather and impression their bar is a little higher (or more conservative) in terms of reliability, and simply not wanting to deal with the apparent issues I've seemed to encounter with other brands. The downtime lost from restoring / reconstructing just isn't worth it to me. Maybe I'm paying twice as much as I ought to, but since making the switch many years back it's worked out pretty well and I've been happy / fortunate.

I run my SSD's in RAID10 using high-end controllers (aside from a few in ZFS).

Just my own subjective experiences, again I'm not doing this at scale.

</comment><comment><USER3> I recently had a similar SSD failure, although it wasn't in a "new fileserver" but my daily use 2013 desktop. It was working, then it was producing write errors corrupting my filesystem, then the whole system died, very quickly. Fortunately for me, some data was recoverable from the corrupted disk; I had a local backup from 12h prior, and a tarsnap backup from about the same time back.

(Um, here's where I have to be critical of tarsnap: their recovery performance is absolutely abysmal for small files. They're latency bound between you, their EC2 instance, and the backing S3 store. Think single or double digit kB/s and then think about how much data you back up with tarsnap. I can't recommend any other backup provider better, but this is an experience where tarsnap left me very disappointed.)

Looking at that SSD and my other SSDs' SMART data, they report extra blocks remaining in SMART, and you can monitor that as it goes down. Ideally you replace the drive before it gets to zero.

My primary mistake was simply not monitoring that data in an effective way.

I don't think anyone who monitors HDDs has any real expectation that the high- level SMART yes/no is going to protect them from data loss. Instead they look at highly predictive factors like "Reallocated_Sector_Ct" or "Raw_Read_Error_Rate" (or even plain old "Power_On_Hours").

For SSDs it's quite similar: Reallocated_Sector_Ct, Power_On_Hours_and_Msec, Available_Reservd_Space, Uncorrectable_Error_Cnt, Erase_Fail_Count, Workld_Media_Wear_Indic, Media_Wearout_Indicator. Maybe NAND_Writes_1GiB.

NVME SSDs provide SMART-like data on logpage 2 ("Available spare", "Percentage used", "Power on hours"). For some reason the NVME spec does not require media to accept host-initiated self-checks, so most NVMe drives don't have the same functionality as smartctl --test. :-(

</comment><comment><USER44> For my home setup, at least, it's simple: Put the OS on a dirt cheap 120GB SSD, and all the user data on a multi-terabyte hard disk. You can always selectively migrate other performance critical, but can afford to lose, stuff onto the SSD later. If it breaks, I just buy another one and reinstall the OS. On laptops that can only take one drive, the SSD is it, but so is awareness that the data on them has to be considered ephemeral. I've had assorted hard disks die over the years, from old age, and so far without exception they've been "mostly" recoverable - might have to give up on a few files that got hit by bad sectors, that sort of thing. And have been warned about impending failure by SMART diagnostics.

<comment><USER44> Quick to add that I also have a backup strategy! Still, a catastrophic failure of a storage device is very inconvenient.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> My first experience with drive failure was a ~40MB HDD expansion card in a 386. The bearings got "sticky", so the spindle wouldn't start rotating. But there was a Al tape covered hole, and you could insert the eraser end of a pencil, and nudge it. So yes, very understandable.

Not too much later, I used Iomega ZIP drives, and experienced the "click of death". That was sudden, and irreversible, but also very understandable.

For the past couple decades, I've consistently used RAID arrays, mostly RAID1 or RAID10 (and RAID0 or RAID5-6 for ephemeral stuff). I've had several HDD failures, but they were usually progressive, and I just swapped out and rebuilt.

I recently had my first SSD failure. And it was also progressive. The first symptom was system freeze, requiring hard reboot, and then I'd see that one of the SSDs had dropped out of the array. But I could add it back. At first, I thought that there was some software problem, and that the RAID stuff was just caused by hard reboot.

But eventually, the box wouldn't boot, so I had to replace the bad SSD and rebuilt the array. It was complicated by having sd _1 RAID10 for /boot, and sd_5 RAID10 for LVM2 and LUKS. So I also had to run fdisk before device mapper would work.

</comment><comment><USER46> From reading that blog and it's sister post about "flaky SMART data" on those same Crucial MX500 drives, reminds me that not all SSDs are created equal.

Just like not all hard drives are created equal. My previous job involved a decade running 10 cabinets of servers an hour away with very little manpower: we eventually came to find that IBM/HGST drives were a lot more reliable than others.

We also evaluated some early SSDs, and they were terribly unreliable. We eventually settled on the Intel drives and they were superb. My new job we've been using mostly Intel and Samsung Pro drives, they work great. But Dell sent us a server with some "enterprise SSDs" in it, that we eventually found were Plextor drives. Those things were terrible. We replaced them immediately with Intel, but used some of the Plextor drives and had all of them fail within a year. I'd put the Intel 64GB SLC drives from our 7 year old database server in a system before I'd put one of those brand new "enterprise" Plextor drives in.

I love Crucial, I buy a lot of RAM from them, but I'm skeptical of switching to other brands of SSDs. The more experience I have, the more conservative I get with systems that matter.

</comment><comment><USER47> I had a bunch of Crucial SSDs die a few years back, they'd work for an hour then disappear from the bus. Reboot and they'd work again for an hour. It turned out Crucial had a small counter tracking uptime by the hour, it would increment the counter to an overflow and crash. This failure could just have easily occur on a spinning hdd.

<comment><USER48> That this was a bug is utterly unsurprising. _How it passed device & firmware QA_ is an utter bafflement to me, however.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> Crucial is using low grade NAND on some of the products: [https://www.reddit.com/r/hardware/comments/a4uwag/spectek_fl...](https://www.reddit.com/r/hardware/comments/a4uwag/spectek_flash_without_logo_grade_marking_low/)

</comment><comment><USER50> I actually much prefer this SSD failure mode: Unlike failing spinning rust which will happily linger around coughing up bad data (which will then be written to backups, mirrored drives, etc. potentially creating a huge mess) an SSD going out like a light is comfortingly binary.

<comment><USER51> Is the thorny problem of elegant vs graceful degradation. In a raid system you want something elegant but not synchronized. In a single drive, some sort of graceful degradation is usually preferable.

[http://www.assetinsights.net/Glossary/G_Elegant_Degradation....](http://www.assetinsights.net/Glossary/G_Elegant_Degradation.html)

[http://www.assetinsights.net/Glossary/G_Graceful_Degradation...](http://www.assetinsights.net/Glossary/G_Graceful_Degradation.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> Relevant: there is a project called LightNVM [0] which is pushing for a much lower level API to SSDs, that allows most of the complexity to be moved into the host OS (namely, Linux).

[0] [http://lightnvm.io](http://lightnvm.io)

</comment><comment><USER53> To add to the anecdata: My most recent SSD failure happened _when I did the firmware upgrade_. It worked before the upgrade, the upgrade binary said 'upgrade failed' and the disk vanished and never returned after the 'upgrade'.

</comment><comment><USER54> This post, more then any other, just convinced me to pull out my old Unison file sync configuration (which was really good, looking at it) and get regular syncs to my NAS (which in turn uploads to cloud storage) working properly again.

</comment><comment><USER55> having recently swapped 100tb of spinning media to ssd I am awaiting the first failures. now being a business environment it is all mirrored capacity. so I guess my question is from the article, are they running on a single device? No raid or mirror?

I am loathe to even keep my personal data at home on one drive and since I use an iMac that requires me to have time machine as mirroring/etc of the internal drive is not truly possible; at least I did not spend enough time researching it

</comment><comment><USER56> I think those drives dying quickly is actually a Good Thing™, because chances you're backing up corrupt data might become smaller…

With the older drives you sometimes would have a drive die, replace it, restore your backup only to find that in the process of dying the drive was actually corrupting some of the data which went into the backups, now you've got to hunt down the last uncorrupted versions of the data in the backup…

</comment><comment><USER57> Did you try to bake it in the oven ("reflow")? Sometimes you can add a few more hours to its life, enough for backing it up.

<comment><USER58> I've had moderate success with sticking failing HDs in the freezer overnight in hopes of getting it to spin one last time.

Never tried baking a drive (ssd or hd), but I have with a red ring'd xbox360 mobo.

Sometimes the "low tech" solutions still work.

<comment><USER59> Curious what is the rationale?

<comment><USER58> I don't know the technical side enough to give any real answer, but tossing them in the freezer (properly sealed of course) always seemed to help "loosen" them up enough to get data off.

I've also had some hard drives that you could bring back to life by giving them a firm knock with your knuckles too.

Doesn't really answer much, but it's a last ditch effort that has saved me more times than not.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> This seems like a the very human problem of trying to grapple with probability.

We have all sorts of knowledge about about it but when something happens we're still looking for an explanation for each instance.

If you think of it like nuclear decay you'll still be able to say things about the ensemble, but not each individual member.

</comment><comment><USER61> "When a HD died early, you could also imagine undetected manufacturing flaws that finally gave way. With SSDs, at least in theory that shouldn't happen"

This is incorrect. As much of the argument seems predicated on this I don't see a real issue.

</comment><comment><USER62> Keep getting a 403 Forbidden error. Anyone have an archive link they can send my way?

</comment><comment> n-gatedotcom Two questions- how do major cloud providers (azure,aws,heroku)handle storage failures?

What are some best practices for personal hard drive crash warly-warning?

<comment><USER41> Redundancy, replication (being able to recreate one failed drive from a certain number of other drives), reliability data, and a replacement budget. That's difficult for personal use.

</comment></comment><comment><USER63> TL;DR Lack of noises makes SSD drives bad at motivating users to do backups or use redundant storage: they don't seem to be on the verge of catastrophic failure.

<comment><USER64> I think operating systems should be programmed to wipe out a drive completely once early in the life of every user (around age 20-ish) to burn in their brain the need to back up!

<comment><USER42> My father had the same concept in getting into a car crash early in my driving life. "Now that you have gotten that out of your system (and I'm glad you're fine), don't ever do it again."

<comment><USER64> Actually that did happen to me early. Luckily enough no harm done. And a lesson for the rest of my life.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER65> Anyone have a good guide on buying reputable ssds?</comment>


Suggestion: weekly "post your startup/project" aggregate threads - <AUTHOR>

Instead of peoples' new startups/projects or project milestones being independent little "show HN" posts that inevitably get lost in the noise, maybe there should be a weekly thread (Mondays? Fridays?) that is bumped up to the top for a day where everyone can post their new work and major announcements. A sort of "what did HN users release this week?" thread. <comment><USER2> There is a thread for feature requests:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=363](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=363)

</comment><comment><USER3> showinghn.com is what I use to see what other people have shown HN</comment>


Ask HN: Review my Startup, Entitea - <AUTHOR> http://entitea.com/

<comment><USER3> The site seems easy enough to navigate and the messaging is straight forward. I don't know enough about the tea market to know how big the niche is (although there is a ton of search volume on Google Trends for tea related keywords, which is a good indicator).

Regarding monetization- I noticed you are using adsense. Your content is so ultra targeted that you would probably make a lot more money with affiliate or revshare deals than with adsense. Here is a list of tea related affiliate programs (I have never used any of these and am not affiliated with them in any way, just thought it would be a good starting point).

[http://www.associateprograms.com/directory/food-and- drink/te...](http://www.associateprograms.com/directory/food-and-drink/tea/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the input, and for the link to the tea related affiliates. I definitely think that is a better way to go for monetizing the site, I'll be looking over those affiliate links.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I liked it, here I was slurping my Irish breakfast tea and it struck an immediate cord ;)

I second the affiliate wisdom.

All teas are not created equally, so one of things that is important to me as a tea drinker is sourcing good teas, as part of the recipe's would be great if I could identify and get high quality components or teas based on recommendations.

To me at least, bags of tea doesn't really sound appealing and isn't specific enough to make these, eg do I use earl grey, irish breakfast, scottish breakfast, ... I would characterise these as flavoured teas, but there's also tea recipe's using components, eg 1 part assam to 2 parts kenyan (or a strong black) with lemon rind for example which is kind of the level of detail I'd be looking for.

Searching for ingredients with assam currently doesn't find anything, so could be a tad smarter maybe, eg find all recipes with black tea in this case. Also brewing etc is really important so I'd be interested in things like brewing techniques as well as recipe's etc.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the specific feedback.

If you wouldn't mind being a little more specific about about the tea bags vs raw ingredients, I'd like to incooperate this in some way but I'd like to get a little more detail on what exactly your view is here. just drop me a line at firstname.lastname@example.com

As for the searching, I plan to add a smarter search very soon, so that it can recommend other keyword searches based on what your original search was for (ie searching for assam will suggest searching for 'black tea', and so on)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I do like the idea; however, the site has aesthetic flaws that need to be addressed.

Notice a site like adagio.com (which sells loose teas): earthy colors combined with attractive closeups of leaves & herbs.

As a tea drinker, the design & color scheme you've chosen really does put me off. Remembering that tea is typically made by steeping leaves, buds, and flowers from nature itself, the abstract graphics and pale blue/white motif feels wrong.

Also, the example recipe on the front page (in addition to many of the contributed recipes) remind me of noncarbonated sodas (or nonalcoholic cocktails), not teas; very sugary, and reliant on extracts and juices (whipped cream?) for flavor. Perhaps you could seed the "teas" section with actual tea blends?

</comment><comment><USER6> The website is gorgeous and the interface is fantastic.

Honestly, the main problem with this website is that gourmet tea lovers don't use recipes. They buy rare and expensive teas and use time-tested ancient brewing methods to get the most out of their treasures.

If you want to cash in on a niche connoseuir [sp?] market, you need to cater to the people who are willing to spend the big bucks to get quality teas. People looking for cranberry chai tea will produce a lot less revenue than those looking for a rare cake of pu-erh tea that is over 80 dollars.

I would say to angle it more towards quality tea and reviews of such tea, not a search engine for recipes.

Check out teaforum.com to learn more, and if you have any questions, ask.

</comment><comment><USER7> Is that a big enough niche to make any money from?

<comment><USER8> Quick question: how big a niche do you think "software for elementary schoolteachers who want to use bingo as an instructional tool" is? Got a mental image? OK.

Did you think that there was enough of a market for one firm to make $30,000 in sales? Yeah, really. <http://www.bingocardcreator.com/stats/sales-by-month>

Now what if I told you I'm probably only the, oh, call it fifth largest player in the space?

I look at "tea" and think "Aww heck how would I ever compete in a market that big?!" Seriously, tea is a multi-billion dollar industry. Of course its going to be big enough to support an extra person or three. The surprising bit is that, at Internet scales, businesses you would _never_ have expected to be viable are big enough, too.

My personal favorite Internet anecdote, from the Dot Com days: there exists a farm which sells tumbleweed. Because if you need tumbleweed, and who doesn't, where are you going to get it? A tumbleweed farm, of course. Most of the Dot Coms have since Dot Bombed, but the Prairie Tumbleweed Farm is still going strong. The address is, naturally, <http://www.prairietumbleweedfarm.com/> .

My favorite Japanese Tex-Mex place is a little shop in Gifu City called El Paso. They have tumbleweed, for the authentic Tex Mex feel. Stop laughing, the owner thought it was important to look the part. And where did they get their tumbleweed? Well, where would YOU get your tumbleweed -- they went to the acknowledged Tumbleweed experts at the Prairie Tumbleweed Farm. Which, helpfully, has pages in Japanese because El Paso is far from the only Japanese establishment that craves the authentic Western look.

<comment><USER9> On Tumbleweed site: "Our Prairie Tumbleweeds are 100% Y2K compliant"

:) -- Now I see why they survived the dot com crash around year 2000

<comment><USER10> It's also great to know that success does not require a fancy looking website. My eyes hurt

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Like the idea - tea would appear too be the worlds most popular drink after water if you believe wikipedia. I've no idea about the size of the specialty tea market but assume it must be big enough to well in financially.

I'd take a second look at those images on the left side of the page - <USER2> writing in them is a bit too small to read.

</comment><comment><USER12> If you expect a lot of german visitors, you might want to partner up with <http://allmytea.de/> ... a site that lets people mix and then order their own tea.

I showed this HN posting to a friend of mine. His reaction was basically "OMFG THAT WAS MY IDEA!"

</comment><comment><USER13> When I looked at your domain name, prior to clicking on the link, I thought, that's a pretty cool domain name -- must be doing something with regard to the semantic web -- silly me!

</comment><comment><USER14> I would consider adding top-rated recipes to the front page.

</comment><comment><USER15> Left after 5 secs because I didn't like the colors.

</comment><comment><USER16> I drink a lot of tea, but mostly just buy varieties off of Adagio. Don't really mix and match. Perhaps I should.

</comment><comment><USER17> agree with the first two.. overall i think a tea site could be aesthetically a little nicer because I imagine the audience your targeting are not for example twitter users, but still very niche. best of luck

</comment><comment><USER18> when I clicked on an ingredient it showed me 3 other teas with that ingredient but it was titled "3 other ingredients" instead of "3 other teas/recipes" as I would have expected.

<comment><USER19> I expected to see information about that ingredient when I clicked on the ingredient - such as what it is, where to buy, how long it could be stored for etc. If this is where people come to learn about tea they surely need to learn about the ingredients.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> is this just straight adsense for revenue? (though I guess you could obviously sell tea...)

<comment><AUTHOR> As of right now yes, but as answerly mentioned going the affiliate route for tea-specific things would probably be a much better way to go.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Very nice website. If you could add coffee, you could count me as a lifetime member. Oh. I would change the color scheme. Maybe adding some brown would not hurt or making the green more minty.

<comment><AUTHOR> I drink coffee too, but are there really enough different coffee recipes to have a social network around them? (I'm much more into tea than coffee, and have just in the past month started on coffee so this is a serious question for you). I like the idea of having maybe different categories, tea, coffee, but would there be enough variations of coffee to do that type of thing?

<comment><USER22> Coffee can fit nicely here I believe. After I graduated, I started drinking coffee and fell in love with it. (My GF believes I have an unhealthy relationship with trying different blends and styles - ie latte, mocha, etc). However, there's a fairly large market for coffee lovers when it comes to blends and also coffee machines.

Do a quick search for "coffee machines forum" and you'll see what I mean.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Your layout gets broken when increasing the font size (Ctrl +).

Other than that, a great website!

</comment><comment><USER24> is it april 1 already? TEA RECIPES????

<comment><USER25> This is a nice idea and as another mentioned tea trends in Google Trends.

Adding coffee would be good too, as well as others mentioned adding earth tones to the design.</comment></comment>


The problem with San Francisco Opera ticket prices - <AUTHOR> http://www.perfectprice.io/blog/opera-pricing-strategy-problems <comment><USER2> There was an interesting NPR episode on ticket resellers a while back: Planet Money (episode 468 - Kid Rock vs The Scalpers) [http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2013/06/25/195641030/episo...](http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2013/06/25/195641030/episode-468-kid- rock-vs-the-scalpers)

They talked about how it's more complex then resellers charging mark-ups to meet market demand. Often, venues have either social pressure or pressure from artists to keep prices low. The idea is that if the venue sells Katy Perry tickets at market price (say $2000/each), her fans are going to be upset with not only the venue but also her, so her management will make sure that doesn't happen.

However, simply lowering ticket prices means losing out on tons of money for both the venue and artist. One solution that is used is: the venue offloads large chunks of their ticket pool to ticket resellers (ticketmaster/stubhub) under the condition that they split a % of the markup with the venue and artist. The reseller absorbs the social blame for 'egregious' ticket prices, the venue/artist keep more of the profits than if they had kept prices below market price.

<comment><USER3> You forgot to mention the one weird trick that Kid Rock uses to help keep ticket prices for his shows lower -- he plays a lot of shows.

<comment><USER4> The second trick is being Kid Rock.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The fact that arbitrage is happening is obviously bad for the Opera, but I want to point out that every opera ticket is sold at a loss. Selling opera tickets just at break-even would drive down attendance significantly (and it's already low).

Opera companies run like VCs: most of the audience/startups are losses, but a few of them are donors/unicorns who keep the opera/VC afloat.

<comment><USER6> > at break-even would drive down attendance significantly (and it's already > low).

But there's an arbitrage from reselling, so clearly retail prices can be raised without hurting attendance significantly?

<comment><USER7> That would only be true if the opera always sold out and lots of people couldn't get seats. If every person that wants to go to the opera is able to do so, the fact that some of them are paying higher amounts doesn't mean everyone should. If the ticket prices raised to the amount the brokers charge, then a lot of the people who are buying direct might just stop attending at all.

<comment><USER8> I'm somewhat distantly familiar with a British opera company. The usual rule is to do one or two mainstream bums-on-seats shows which are more or less guaranteed to be successful, and then fill in with less standard repertoire around the edges.

So sell out shows do happen, at more or less standard prices that are surprisingly affordable, and much less than big name pop artists charge for their tickets. But the sell out shows are more or less at capacity. There certainly aren't thousands of people willing to pay five times as much for a seat.

And in fact there is absolutely no way that income from ticket sales would be enough to keep the company running.

The rest of the money comes from sponsors and from Arts Council funding. Getting money from both is a highly skilled full-time job.

This company happens to be very good at fundraising, which is why they still exist. (Actually they're very good at everything, not least the artistic side.)

Would on-demand pricing work? Absolutely not. The audience is older and fairly faithful, and they tend to feel they have a personal relationship of sorts with the company.

Variable on-demand ticket pricing would completely destroy that relationship, and I would be hugely surprised if it didn't also make sponsors feel like less like contributing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Always buy higher-end arts tickets directly. You can probably claim most of it as a charitable tax deduction (the difference vs a GA ticket). The SF Ballet even has a page on it: "*You may deduct up to 80% of your Preferred Seating Premium on your taxes. Please consult your tax advisor for more information." [https://www.sfballet.org/tickets/seating/repertory](https://www.sfballet.org/tickets/seating/repertory)

</comment><comment><USER10> The author is suggesting yield management to mitigate price arbitrage. Airlines have been doing this for years (maximize butts in seats & profit)., and require entire teams of business analysts to monitor the supply & demand of tickets, and reclassify seats so they stay balanced.

Every flight/hotel-comparison website has its goal to make the yield management team as ineffective as possible. Being too effective means running your suppliers out-of-business!

</comment><comment><USER11> Arbitrage is never shady.

Sure, the seller might feel upset that they lost out on a slice of the profit, but that doesn't imply that the reseller is in the wrong.

<comment> vertex-four If I really, really want to ensure that people who might not be able to afford market price can reasonably come to see my show while still making a reasonable profit, there's no mechanism under capitalism to be able to do that, because of arbitrage. I think that's sad.

<comment><USER12> > If I really, really want to ensure that people who might not be able to > afford market price can reasonably come to see my show while still making a > reasonable profit, there's no mechanism under capitalism to be able to do > that, because of arbitrage.

But people who can afford your artificially-cheap tickets can sell them to folks who can afford the market price, making them better-off.

<comment> vertex-four > But people who can afford your artificially-cheap tickets can sell them to > folks who can afford the market price, making them better-off.

Except that in reality they can't because other large companies and people who have this down to a business buy all your tickets first. Also, money does not actually replace not getting to see a unique show. We can see this by the fact that not everybody sells their cheap tickets onwards.

Long story short - the group of people who really wants to see the show but can't afford it, and the group of ticket scalpers, are really, really not the same groups, 99% of the time - unless all your fans are ticket scalpers. This is pretty much by definition. Why is worship of capitalism more important than a person's desire to ensure their fans can actually afford to go see them?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Reminds me of viagogo a bit, a ticket 'second hand' reselling website. Through some undercover investigations ([https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WWlnL8drSdw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WWlnL8drSdw)) it turned out that they are only partly a second hand site but have a stack of credit cards and buy out most of the ticket stock available to resell it with crazy margins.

It went so far that ticketing companies even gave them ticket stock for re- selling with a high margin to get a higher cut of the ticket sale. This especially happens for very popular concerts where the demand is high and people are willing to pay.

</comment><comment><USER14> It seems like the article is missing a possible situation (which I believe is likely). Suppose -The ticket price is the market price and a raise would drive away a lot of buyers -A small portion of buyers do not do the full ticket research and are happy with $265 tickets.

Their conclusion that "Demand and Supply is out of balance" seems to assume that each buyer is the same and has some probability of buying at a given price. Instead, there are a few people who buy at the bigger price without thinking. The fact that these people exist does not mean that raising the price won't decrease the number of buyers.

</comment><comment><USER15> Is changing the pricing scheme the only solution here? Maybe part of the opera's goal is to appeal to a broader range of demographics, or any other reason they aren't trying to maximize profits. It would be nice if they could make a good living for themselves and still keep tickets affordable for everyone. There must be a way to maintain a discrepancy between what people are willing to pay and what people have to pay, where the opera can meet their non-monetary goals while reducing this third party arbitrage.

</comment><comment><USER16> > Clearly, the opera itself should price its tickets to more accurately > reflect demand. And the great irony is that, by doing so, more often than > not lower prices will bring new people into the opera, while high prices > will capture demand from the price insensitive.

So let's untangle these two sentences near the end of this essay.

1\. I believe that the San Francisco Opera should raise its prices to match - or exceed - what this ticket scalper site is asking. 2\. But lower ticket prices will usually result in more butts in seats.

The entire post is written from the perspective that the Opera should be making the absolute highest amount of money per ticket sale possible. But at the end of the post, the author very casually mentions that this is going to probably mean a lot fewer butts in seats _watching opera_. And then completely ignores it, going on to suggest ways the SFO could learn from TicketMiddleManThatHopesYouDon'tThinkVeryHard.Com.

I have not been to the San Francisco Opera; I do not know how much it's focused on the bottom line. But I would bet money that, if offered the choice between getting about twice as much per seat, and getting more viewers, the SFO would probably choose the latter. Because arts organizations don't just exist to make money; they exist to _spread their art_. You have to pay enough attention to the bottom line to be able to pay everyone involved enough to keep doing it, but it should never be an organization's only concern.

The author of this post also offers us no statistics on how many tickets to the SFO are actually _bought_ though the scalper site that's selling them for about twice what they cost versus ones sold directly by the Opera. The fact that someone built a robot that automatically scrapes a ton of venues and offers their tickets at 200% markups, and did some SEO tricks to make it pop up higher than the actual site for people who don't block ads, doesn't mean they're automatically capturing the money of everyone who types "san francisco opera tickets" into Google. Without evidence of that, I seriously doubt his thesis that this is money the SFO is leaving on the table.

I am also pretty amazed by the fact that the closing paragraphs suggesting "dynamic pricing" and noting that it can be very complex to do don't casually link to any of the services provided by the company whose blog this is on, because they seem to be trying to do just that.

tl;dr:

1\. the existence of a bot that offers San Francisco Opera tickets at a crazy markup doesn't mean enough people actually buy through it to be worth chasing,

2\. raising prices to match this bot probably runs counter to the part of an opera house focused of Getting More People Interested In Watching Opera Instead Of Playing Video Games Or Whatever.

3\. geeze dude you write an essay this long that's a stealth ad for your company and you can't even slip a link into the concluding paragraph?

<comment><USER17> In general, I guess I'm confused why someone wanting a ticket to an event wouldn't at least check to see whether it was available and for how much on the venue/organization's own site. It would certainly be the first place I'd look for tickets.

Sure, if there's nothing available or available seats aren't great, I might suck it up and go to a ticket broker if I really wanted to see something. But my assumption going in would be that I should expect to pay a big premium.

Maybe there are people out there who aren't price sensitive and default to making ticket purchases through StubHub or whatever, but I have trouble believing it's the norm.

I'd just add that although I don't really think dynamic pricing is a good idea here, presumably the San Francisco Opera, like many such organizations, does price discriminate is various ways: VIP seating, student tickets, more expensive weekend tickets, etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> > _Not only does nobody benefit (except the broker)_

vs

> _Nearly every major venue and sports team sells to brokers. This brings cash > in the door and reduces the risk to the venue._

These two comments are in direct opposition to each other. I don't like scalping of tickets, but if a venue is knowingly and willingly selling to scalpers, then obviously they do get some net benefit.

</comment><comment><USER19> The Opera is partly a status indicator and a networking opportunity. Lowering the prices would drive off the donors. I get the feeling that for a vast majority of people the Opera is seen as a Richie Rich event off limits to them.

</comment><comment><USER20> "Booking fees have long been something that consumers grumble about–but pay."

Not exactly. I mean yeah, I sometimes pay them, but I simply go out far less because of them. So choose wisely if you're going to go that route!

</comment><comment><USER21> Mods, a de-clickbaited headline suggestion: "A company might be arbitraging SF Opera tickets"</comment>


Consumer Prices in U.S. Decline 1%, Most on Record - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601068&sid=aEUKE5CH6LeU&refer=home

<comment><USER2> Oh no! Not something that's good for the consumer! Hurry up, someone print more money.

For the record, in the post-Civil War error we experienced mild deflation and strong economic growth. As long as prices don't make sudden, double-digit jumps, the economy can cope with it. And it's NICE to see consumer prices going down for a change.

<comment><USER3> _Not something that's good for the consumer!_

no doubt some reversion to the mean is beneficial...but a healthy economy shows some nonzero manageable _inflation_ level...like around 2-3%. a deflating economy is deadly in the longer run, because demand goes away and so does employment.

<comment><USER4> Exactly. I have no debt and a bit of cash savings that are now worth 1% more, woo hoo!

Sustained high deflation is only good for you if you have a magical source of guaranteed income, completely and totally independent of the economy, like a magic money printing machine.

<comment><USER2> Wages tend to be sticky. That is, they adjust slower than many other prices. This works against workers in an inflationary environment and for them in a deflationary environment. Keynesian monetary stimulus is premised on the "sticky wage" theory, basically the idea that by printing money you can reduce workers' real wages in the short run and increase the output of firms.

Of course the flip side is that if workers' real wages increase too much in a deflationary environment, this could lead to high unemployment in the short term.

<comment><USER4> Wages are sticky but jobs aren't.

Hyperinflation kills banks, because the loans devalue so fast they are worth nothing when they are repaid.

Deflation in small amounts can be good for savers, but high and sustained deflation kills all borrowers.

That includes short term financing businesses need to pay salaries while sales are still being made and profits are still coming in.

Overall it leads to everyone hoarding cash and not spending and that just murders the economy.

<comment><USER2> Sharp deflation, like during the Great Depression, is bad as you say. Slow deflation, like the period after resumption, is not bad.

In reality, the economy is quite capable of coping with any mild change in prices, and quite bad at dealing with sharp changes in price. It doesn't particularly matter whether those changes are up or down.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Just goes to show how much we were getting shafted by OPEC.

</comment><comment><USER6> Reddit isn't going to like this ... no sir</comment>